Re: Alternatives

build yourself a new CD-image from the original XP-
CD with the use of: http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html


I've seen that. It looks like a good idea, though
I haven't tried it. But that's certainly not something
that one can recommend to a non-techy person, any
more than one can recommend hunting down a Win98
compatible motherboard. And it still doesn't cure some
of the biggest XP drawbacks. A few that come to mind:

1) Product activation. I don't accept any of the various
arguments for going along with that. Period.

2) Online security issues. RPC simply cannot be turned
off on XP. One can turn off DCOM and many of the
other networking functions that shouldn't be installed
in the first place (Messenger, Alerter, etc.) but the
unfortunate fact remains that XP is designed as a
networked system.

3) Disk wear: I turn off indexing. I remove PCHealth,
thereby disabling Windows File Protection. I turn off
System Restore. I disable the vast majority of XP
services. Yet if I leave the machine sitting it will still
thrash every couple of minutes. And it's not just a
little bit of disk access. It's extensive, as though I
were starting OpenOffice or installing software.

4) Spyware. With nearly all services turned off, with
WU deactivated, with Windows Media Player deleted,
have I turned off all MS spyware? It's hard to know.
There was a controversy awhile back when Windows
Update turned out to be updating itself, even when shut
off. That meant that something was still calling home.
And I'm guessing it's more than just one something.

5) General difficulty: Unnecessary restrictions and
warnings... A tendency to slow down over time... Absurdly
complex folder structures. A system of "users" and
permissions that are irrelevant and unused in most
SOHo situations. Etc. (I had to write a script just to
empty TEMP files because there are about a half
dozen possible TEMP folders on XP!)

So for myself, I can clean up XP to the point that it's
as fast as Win98 and handles a load much better. And I
can work around most of the restrictions, poor design, the
fact that the Find applet doesn't really work, etc. That
makes it rather nice to use, at least offline. But while
I'll recommend XP over Win98 to non-tech friends, I still
cringe when doing so. It's not so much the best product
but rather the lesser of the evils.



.

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